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AWOL

What makes a soldier desert his country and risk arrest by the government and rejection from his family and friends?

The cold front that was supposed to hit has definitely hit, and Brandi is leaning forward to see. She has the windshield wipers on superhigh, and she is trying to figure out what will happen when they get to Canada. "Listen, Dad, I'll block the guards with the van if you have to bust out," she is saying to Josh, her husband. "You just bust out runnin', okay?"

"That's exactly what I intend to do, Mom," he says, all courageous. A big man with a square, cinder-block head, he has a gentle demeanor and not a lot of complaints. She is more the beautiful and voluptuous type, dark and flirtatious like Monica Lewinsky, although nowhere near as fruit loopy. Both 26, they have been in love since they met at 18, at the Taco Mayo in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and already they have produced four children, all of whom are in the backseat being pretty cooperative, and the boys are eating Fruit Roll-Ups.

"Once you cross the border, I don't think they can push you back over into America," she says. She imagines a line in the middle of the road that says CANADA on one side and AMERICA on the other.

His picture is more of a river with huge ice chunks owing. "If I have to jump into the water," he says, "you just hit the gas. You just go. I'll get in touch with you."

"I'm gonna block them with the van!" she insists.

"All right."

They fall silent for a moment, as they have in fits and starts ever since they started seeing signs for Niagara Falls. Canada. Canada? Crazy. If this isn't the craziest damn thing.

"Do you think they can push you back over once you get across the border?" she asks. "Because that would not be fair."

"No, I don't think they can," he says.

If he had in his possession anything besides his military ID, this would not, of course, be such a big deal. If he had a valid driver's license, he could just pull up to the border guard and whip out that license and say, "Just visiting, sir. Nothing going on here but me and my family on a friendly visit to Canada, sir."

But when you've been on the run for over a year, avoiding arrest, you can't exactly send in your driver's license for renewal.

The guards at the border almost certainly have his name on a list. That's what he gures. There's probably some ofcial AWOL list hanging up on the wall and his name is right there on it. Joshua Key, U.S. Army private first class, skipped out in November 2003, after serving seven months in Iraq with the Forty-third Combat Engineer Company, Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. He's a wanted man. He's the property of the U.S. government, and the U.S. government doesn't take kindly to being stoled from.

He didn't grow up military. He was really only just coming to understand the culture when he up and left it. Let's just say none of it was what it was cracked up to be. Crazy. He and Brandi both are still trying to totally comprehend the fact that the military is allowed to lie to you. It's allowed to lie to you when you are a civilian and when you are a soldier, too. The lying is probably the biggest disappointment, the source of a disillusionment that has fallen over him like a net, a tangle of doubt and cynicism and paranoia that was never there before. For a guy like him, who didn't grow up sophisticated in ways of even bending the truth, it's still almost impossible for the lying to totally sink in.

But, of course, one day it did sink in, one day early on in his deployment in Iraq. It was like the whole thing flip-flopped. It was like he went over there to do right, even to kill if he had to, whatever was necessary to defend America from the terrorists. But then he got there and none of them Iraqis looked to him like terrorists. They were just regular people walking down the streets of Ramadi, wondering what all them U.S. soldiers were doing shooting up the place. For Josh it was like, Wait a second, we're occupiers? We're the enemy? We're the bad guys? Crazy. This don't make no sense. Next thing he knows, he's raiding houses in Ramadi and Fallujah at 4 a.m., just busting in and waking innocent people up from their sleep. His job was to get the women and kids up against the wall and zip-cuff the men and load them in the trucks and shoot, yeah, just shoot any old kid walking down the street if you had to, and make no mind of that little Iraqi girl getting her head blowed up against a wall, that girl who used to bring him water from the Euphrates that he was too afraid to drink because of all the crap in that river, but eventually he drank it just to be nice. Dead. Her brains all over the wall. And then here comes his buddy with his leg blowed off, and he has to load him on the chopper and then load his leg on there, too. Then he has to clean the blood off his buddy's gun, with a bucket of water and a rag. For what. For what?

A soldier, of course, is not supposed to think like that. A soldier is just supposed to be...a soldier. But then, how did that even happen? How did he end up a fucking soldier? This don't make no sense. None of this don't make no kinda sense.

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